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I appreciate the tech very much, but the visions of "Millions of people working in space"? I have no desire to be a part of that but I do wonder what they'll be

• GuiA 10y ago
  > I do wonder what they'll be working on? Why, they'll be driving SpaceUbers, doing the laundry, delivering food, walking the dogs, etc of all the techies debugging the asteroid mining robots, of course.
  • oblib 10y ago
    Ok. That makes sense because somebody will have to do all that. If I do have to go I'm gonna want Pizza.
• ganfortran 10y ago
  Yeah, that is my question. Why living on Mars, where you don't even have drinking water available? Human population in a lot countries, such as Japan/China/Korea is going to shrink pretty soon. In US, without immigrants, the population is on the same track with those eastern asian countries as well. And working in space...for what reason? For certain industry maybe, but is it a really a worthy goal to chase after? I don't know.
  • speeder 10y ago
    I think part of the reason os that it os a chance to explore and "tame" new lands. I am from Brazil, that is a gigantic country with stupid amounts of land. Also I really wanted to live on a rural community and farm a bit, yet somehow it seems 100% of the land, even the most inaccessible places, have an owner, and prices of land a ludicrous (land in Brazil somehow cost more than same land in France plus real medieval castle in it...) So, colonizing mars sound awesome.
    • ganfortran 10y ago
      > prices of land a ludicrous Well, trip to Mars won't be cheap, and by the point it is inhabitable for average people, it would have land owner maybe government as well, at that point.
  • adrianN 10y ago
    We have to eventually leave Earth if we want to ensure the survival of our race. A base on Mars that eventually can become self-sufficient is a great first step.
    • ganfortran 10y ago
      If human fuck up Earth, I don't think Mars will survive either.
      • TeMPOraL 10y ago
        Now? No. In few hundreds years? Maybe.
• Hermel 10y ago
  You clearly are not a visionary pioneer. That's what it is about. To go where no one else has gone before, just for the sake of it. Remember, there are plenty of people doing things like climbing Mount Everest for fun while you and I are watching Netflix.
  • oblib 10y ago
    Oh, but I do have vision. I'm looking for more than a few wealthy joyriders poking holes in the atmosphere here for nothing more than shits and giggles and questioning how that might affect our planet.
    • aoeu345 10y ago
      If you're going to talk up preservation of the atmosphere while downplaying the enormous technological progress and bold, financially uncertain moves that SpaceX is making, you need to give your head a shake. The atmosphere has already been killed. And the methane that's being unlocked because of it's desecration will kill you, and it will kill me. We killed ourselves with the same type of ignorance towards new, uncertain technology that you have displayed in this comment chain. We took existing, working, and bad technology (ICE vehicles) and paraded it around to the world, and it worked, because we could show people how to use them to make money. We had an MVP with gasoline powered vehicles. People ate it up. Yet electric cars, the correct technology choice, get no mindshare with the serfs because they're heavier, slower, and can't exactly carry a dump truck full of aggregate rock up inclines for 24 hours a day. You need to stop with the sour grapes, the tall poppy syndrome, and you need to start supporting the people who are actually doing shit. And you need to do it before the window of opportunity to use our technology to save ourselves closes. Keep in mind that me writing this comment to you is an enormous waste of my time, and I really thought it through, so please absorb the meaning in my words and stop having these pissing matches on the internet over things you completely misunderstand.
      • averagewall 10y ago
        If you're saying climate change will kill any significant fraction of people alive today - enough that you expect it to kill you personally, then I think you need some evidence for that. It seems like quite an unbelievable claim - effectively the end of civilization within our lifetime.
• snowwrestler 10y ago
  Tourism is a multi-billion-dollar industry that employs millions, which involves a lot of going places and staying places for no practical reason. Vacationing with a view of the Earth's limbe is conceptually not that different from vacationing on a cruise ship around the Caribbean. Sure, the losgistics are a bit tougher; the ship goes Mach 25 and a broken window will boil everyone's blood in a few minutes. But the point is to get out of the house and get some reading done somewhere else.
• hwillis 10y ago
  >I appreciate the tech very much, but the visions of "Millions of people working in space"? "The billionaire tech entrepreneur also laid out a vision for space commercialization that stretches out for hundreds of years, leading to an era when millions of people would be living and working in space."[1] This is hundreds of years in the future, at which point Bezos believes the population of the earth will be in the tens or hundreds of billions. He thinks the surface of the earth will be "zoned strictly for 'residential and light industrial'", probably for a combination of pollution, land quality, and resource scarcity. In that scenario (which seems unlikely) millions of people would be like .001% of the population, which makes... some sense? [1] http://www.geekwire.com/2016/jeff-bezos-lifts-curtain-blue-origin-rocket-factory-vision-space/ http://www.geekwire.com/2016/jeff-bezos-lifts-curtain-blue-o...
  • riffraff 10y ago
    > at which point Bezos believes the population of the earth will be in the tens or hundreds of billion where do you see this mentioned? I think it's generally agreed earth population will never get to hundreds of billion, the demographic trend is to get to around ~10B and stop there (kids per family decrease as living conditions improve, and they are at ~2 in most of the world bar africa) EDIT: AIU it, Bezos just thinks we will have laws set up to avoid destroying our environment, hence forbidding things like heavy industry on earth.
  • dagw 10y ago
    leading to an era when millions of people would be living and working in space. That was one thing in The Expanse (great TV show about basically this (and also a series of books that I haven't read yet)), that I found a bit odd. We're currently doing everything we can to replace truck drivers and miners on earth with robots. So why would truck driving and mining in space be done entirely by humans?
    • TeMPOraL 10y ago
      Apparently they don't have advanced enough robots to do all the jobs for humans. The problem with automation and AI is that a powerful enough AI will render any story pretty boring, because it can basically do anything. So when writing fiction, one has to put brakes on some implications of technology just to be able to make a story. But assuming that fully-automated space-everything wasn't developed before Epstein drive[0], the geopolitical (systempolitical?) situation makes the whole scenario plausible - you have overcrowded Earth with most people living on Basic Income just because there aren't enough opportunities, Martians hell-bent on terraforming their world ASAP, and the Belters, who can't live downwell and whose ability to provide services to inner planets is the only way to survive out there. One could imagine a strong opposition to automated mining from the Belt, and powers on Earth and Mars not too eager to upset that. -- Also, read the books. TV show is awesome, but the books are even better :). I binge-read them all last month. -- [0] - pretty much the only fictional human technology in The Expanse; it's a hyper-efficient fusion drive
• desireco42 10y ago
  I really appreciate your skeptical view. It is awesome to hear it. I obviously don't share it at all. My arguments would be what others already pointed out, that tourism is irrational industry and the crazier the ride, the more people will be interested. I am really overjoyed that something is happening on space front.
  • x2f10 10y ago
    >tourism is [an] irrational industry and the crazier the ride, the more people will be interested. The comparison is foolish. NASA's estimates a trip to Mars would take 21 months [1]. I don't know where you work, but I doubt you have 21 months of vacation accrued. If you do, do you have the $250k per ticket? If you do, do you have mental / psychical health to be accepted? If you do, do you accept the flight risks? If you do, do you accept that time does not stop on Earth (loved ones aging, loved ones dying, etc)? If you do, you're _incredibly rare_. This isn't flying 6-hour flight to Mexico to sit on the beach. 1. https://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/venus/q2811.html https://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/venus/q2811.html
• nottorp 10y ago
  "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers".
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• simonh 10y ago
  Translation: I don't want to do it for the reasons given, therefore nobody could possibly want to do it for the reasons given, therefore they are lying.
  • drcross 10y ago
    This is also the fallacy that I find most frustrating- "I am a salesman who travels 500 miles a day and the Model S doesn't have that capability so the Tesla company will never amount to anything and are doomed to failure."
    • simonh 10y ago
      When the iPad came out someone on Reddit said that they need to plug in a scanner to their laptop and you can't plug in scanners to iPads, so therefore the iPad was 'dead on arrival'. I'm sure there are still people out there who think that's still true because they don't have one.
  • oblib 10y ago
    That's a huge leap there Simon. You're not even close to the mark though.
• cm2187 10y ago
  And from an industrial point of view it is not like there are hidden mysteries in the close proximity of earth. And the industrial applications (mining mostly) are unlikely to be economical with rockets. We would need a much more economical way to lift heavy material. So I am not sure what entrepeneurs Bezos is referring to. I totally get the personal excitment. And with a few dozen millions dollars in my pocket I would totally invest into something fun even if uneconomical.
  • simonh 10y ago
    >So I am not sure what entrepeneurs Bezos is referring to. Probably people like Planetary Resources[0] and Deep Space Industries[1] that intend to get their raw materials from Space. [0]http://www.planetaryresources.com http://www.planetaryresources.com [1]http://deepspaceindustries.com http://deepspaceindustries.com
    • usrusr 10y ago
      Or that intend to get their investments from people who just want to believe.
  • TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Mining in space only to drop the resources downwell is uneconomical. Moving industry to space, where the resources are, and dropping only final products downwell might make more sense - especially if "moving industry" actually means rebuilding it with resources mined in space. But for that to happen, someone needs to lay the groundworks.
  • kamaal 10y ago
    You are assuming people will mine things and send them to earth. There isn't much joy in that. You could sell your stuff to the local space colony of the billionaires a thousand kilometers away from the mining site.
• TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > "Millions of people working in space"? I have no desire to be a part of that but I do wonder what they'll be working on? I'll leave explaining most of that point to a pretty good filk song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab_mH8R0KTM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab_mH8R0KTM http://lyrics.wikia.com/wiki/Julia_Ecklar:One_Way_To_Go http://lyrics.wikia.com/wiki/Julia_Ecklar:One_Way_To_Go Maybe to quote one verse: Breaking free of gravity, moving industry Beyond the planet's surface into space Lunar mines and factories, Lagrange Point colonies, Total productivity and nothing goes to waste Solar-sailing ships deployed to mine the asteroids While Earth becomes a paradise, her ugly scars erased If you want a more "vivid" and detailed view of how this may look like (good and bad sides), I'd recommend "The Expanse" book series (and TV show) - a hard sci-fi about humans who just begun expanding throughout the Solar System. There are lots of useful things to do in space, but we need to bootstrap a profitable economy in space to get there.
  • legulere 10y ago
    Sorry I cannot see the relationship between moving industries into space and total productivity or earth becoming a paradise. Moving things between space and earth will always be costly and people will still want to live on earth. If we can solve waste, productivity issues in space why should we not be able to also solve them on earth?
    • TeMPOraL 10y ago
      The idea here is that industries tend to be close to where their inputs come from; there are many more resources up there than on the planet, and once we bootstrap space mining it might be more economical to move various stages of manufacturing to space than to keep them downwell and drop raw materials from the sky. Moving mining and manufacturing means also moving the big sources of pollution. "Total productivity" and "Earth becoming a paradise" are dreams, of course. This is a song, not an economics report. But it outlines pretty well the things people might reasonably want to do in space, and why.
• delegate 10y ago
  If you look deep enough you will find that even life on Earth is meaningless. Our very existence is just a ride on a blue-green rock inside a meat suit. For a more 'down-to-earth' answer, we can look into the past - how did the space race, landing on the moon, etc contribute to the development of science, technology, art... Did that have anything to do with our development as a species ? If we manage to settle on Mars, that would mean a great deal of new technological and scientific discoveries - which we'll be able to apply here on Earth. Maybe the solutions for the problems we experience here on Earth lay on other planets ? Other planets will follow and eventually other stars. There will probably be generations of people who live and grow on a space ship, watching space youtube and movies all their lives - set in a strange distant place called Earth. Eventually, they will arrive on a planet far away and settle there - maybe they'll forget all about their space trip and technology - become farmers and raise space chicken - only to reinvent rockets once again thousands of years later. Maybe this whole thing is inside our DNA ?
  • sweezyjeezy 10y ago
    I think there are definitely a small minority with the 'explorer gene', who are keen to be on the frontier. But most of us (if we're really honest with ourselves) would find it too hard to live on Mars in the next 50 years (say). Being so far away from home, simple things like the lack of internet, your surroundings being mile after mile of this : https://go.nasa.gov/2p4TKrK https://go.nasa.gov/2p4TKrK. I think realistically most of the people who first colonise mars will be doing it for financial reasons, because better options are not available to them on Earth.
    • aianus 10y ago
      They're not going to let random hobos move to Mars. Anyone that would be accepted for that mission would have perfectly adequate financial options available to them on Earth.
    • Strom 10y ago
      Lack of internet seems like an overly pessimistic view. We have a connection with Mars already, streaming high quality media and other data back to us. Having actual people on Mars would only increase the demand for better internet connectivity and I see no reason why that connectivity won't be improved. Sure the delay fluctuates between 5-25 minutes, so you won't be enjoying any realtime activities like voice calls or playing Quake. [1] Initially bandwidth will probably also be too low to casually download 4K cat videos. However there won't be any issue with setting up a local Mars community web proxy that downloads HN & friends in compressed batches. There are a lot of things to do on the internet where even a 25 minute delay is no biggie. -- [1] Although it shouldn't take too long until there are enough local people on Mars for low latency activities among themselves.
• andr3w321 10y ago
  I am sure people said the same thing about sending ships across the Atlantic to America 500 years ago. What's the point? Why leave Europe? There's nothing over there.
  • jbattle 10y ago
    no way! they knew they would find spices, gold and prester john. And they found 2 out of 3
• marcofloriano 10y ago
  A good and honest opinion for 2017. But probably not for 2050. You see, vision is something you go for the long haul, not a couple decades. The world will evolve a lot, specially in the sense of using Space, Moon and Mars as the foundation to colonies. One thing i do believe is the possibility to mining space (specially asteroids, like this -> "NASA to explore asteroid made of $10,000 quadrillion worth of metal", google it). I imagine SpaceX and Blue Origins playing a huge part (if not all) in the future of this kind of exploration.
• agumonkey 10y ago
  The thing about living on Mars, is ... it's gonna be exactly like living on earth socially speaking. There will be morons, suboptimal structures, chaos, forced order, etc etc. A bit like living at the North Pole, without the air (until they complete pressurized bases). In my mind, there's trillions of things to do here that we don't get to do. Sure looking at mars sky would be something amazing, but I'm not in a hurry.
  • krisroadruck 10y ago
    Probably fewer morons given that the initial population will be comprised mostly of scientists, engineers, and people with the brains/gumption to amass enough wealth to afford a civilian ticket.
    • agumonkey 10y ago
      I can think of at least one whealthy moron right now. But you're right, a large chunk of the population will be highly educated.
• FLUX-YOU 10y ago
  >I appreciate the tech very much, but the visions of "Millions of people working in space"? I have no desire to be a part of that but I do wonder what they'll be working on? Infrastructure, warehouses, and a rescue network mostly likely. Getting fuel reserves and supplies into particular places, making ranger stations, and maintaining all of that. It's also not impossible that some mega rich people decide to fund private projects that only have a slim chance of making a profit. Most of them will fail, but they'll still need workers while it's ongoing, and that still means you're giving knowledge to humanity when those workers figure stuff out and train others. >And "Living on Mars". No thanks, I'll pass on that too. That's fine. It seems rough because it is (understatement of the year). But there's always going to be a subset of the population who just want to get out and explore and colonize. The risk is not for everyone, because yes, sometimes you go exploring and die for a stupid reason completely out of your control. Besides, we really don't have any full-time Martian marketing agencies to influence everyone's perceptions of life on mars. So of course it seems terrible. :)
• Symmetry 10y ago
  Currently space is a $330 billion a year industry providing things like pictures of the Earth, communication, etc with a bit of science thrown in. And there are a bunch of other useful things people want to do in space which are currently infeasible because access to space is too expensive. If access prices go down we should expect the dollar value of the off Earth economy to go up and more people up there to do things like repairs. EDIT: And Blue Origin and SpaceX both use liquid fuel rockets exclusively which cause very little ozone depletion. There combustion byproducts are entirely made from oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon with no nitrogen or chlorine mixed in. EDIT2: Also, apart from the danger of ozone depletion there really isn't any harm in "poking holes in the atmosphere". The atmosphere is a fluid, it flows back together just fine after the rocket passes.
• nickparker 10y ago
  This is going to come off nauseatingly optimistic, but here's my take: Made in Space is working on producing ZBLAN optical fiber in orbit, for sale back on Earth. [1] ZBLAN is an alternative to normal silicate fiber which has much higher theoretical performance limits, but worse performance in practice due to gravity induced crystalline impurities. Producing it in microgravity should allow it to reach its full potential. They haven't launched the first batch yet, but their claim is that because optical fiber doesn't weigh much, and this higher quality fiber is so valuable, it's actually profitable at current launch costs to do this manufacturing in orbit. The linked article ends with a quote from the CEO: "We believe in-space manufacturing of goods valuable to people on Earth will soon drive significant commercial activity in space, perhaps one day creating a space-based economic boom." Consider the lithography processes our chips are made with, or the single-crystal turbine blades that help modern jet engines and rocket turbopumps work as well as they do. There's an enormous variety of precision processes that could benefit from operating under an ambient acceleration between 0 and 1g. Orbital manufacturing is probably the most believable short term goal for commercial space, but there are a plenty of extremely exciting opportunities out there: - The Mars colony will be our stepping stone out into the asteroids and the rest of the solar system. The thin atmosphere and lower gravity makes lifting mass from the Martian surface about an order of magnitude less difficult than lifting from Earth's surface. The difference is so extreme, that if you assume commodities will someday cost about the same on both planets, structures in Earth orbit would actually be cheaper to build and launch from Mars and then tug over to Earth. - The potential wealth from mining other bodies is unfathomably huge. A small minority of asteroids out there are actually chunks of proto-planet cores unleashed during the violence of the early solar system. A single rock like that has more accessible platinum, rhodium, and other heavy metals than all known accessible deposits on Earth's surface. This fact becomes a little less surprising when you learn that all of Earth's accessible deposits are nothing more than impact sites from rocks like this. The "original" heavy metals of Earth all settled deep inside the core while the planet was still molten, far too deep for us to ever reach. These heavy elements are unbelievably useful. The state of the art in a huge fraction of the "hard" problems in chemistry boils down to "We can do it with platinum group catalysts, but those cost too much for industrial use." - Orbital superstructures. Made in Space's Archinaut project [2] is an early effort to free satellite designers from the size and weight constraints of delicate folding structures riding inside a single rocket fairing. It's still early, but once launch costs drop and/or we start doing heavy in-situ mining, we can reasonably start building kilometer scale stations. Enormous solar arrays to power all our new orbital industry, or 5,000 person orbital ring cities with a relaxing level of partial g and perfect climate control. I'd love to live in a place like that. My favorite analogy for this is the settling of America. Settling the new world in sailing ships that took a month to cross the Atlantic was a terrible investment with hardly any foreseeable return. But then we made better boats, and new communication systems, and all sorts of other new technologies which created exponential returns from the colonies. The west still leads the world because of the unimaginable profits it made off the Americas. Settling space, and particularly Mars, is the biggest opportunity we've had since the 1500s. [1] http://www.madeinspace.us/projects/fiber/ http://www.madeinspace.us/projects/fiber/ [2] http://www.madeinspace.us/projects/archinaut/ http://www.madeinspace.us/projects/archinaut/